The Proposal
Issue 15 | June 2010
Agency
OgilvyOne Beijing
Creative Team
Doug Schiff, Sean Shi, Teonghoe Teng, Liu Fang, William Liu, Fish Yu, Wei Xu
Production Team
Agency Producer: Daging Wang, Zhuang Yu; Post Production: Light Box
Other Credits
Account Team: Lily Tung, Kelly Bai, Andy Liu, Suya Wang, Nicole Wu
Date
December 2009 – February 2010
Background
Software developers get invited to lots of conferences.
As IBM was hosting the Rational Software Conference of 2009 their challenge was to connect with developers in a unique, meaningful way. IBM had ambitious attendance goals but even more ambitious sales lead objectives.
Idea
The campaign’s insight was that developers are not robotic dullards, but actually quite creative, with a tremendous passion for do-it-yourself innovation. This led to the idea of seeding a viral video deep within the IT digital community to intrigue the developer’s technological curiosity. In the video, a developer, with help from his techie friends, puts together a mobile phone light show; actually it’s a creative marriage proposal to his girlfriend. The video, seen on SNS and video sites, and on the most influential IT blogs, sent viewers to software discussion groups, where they could click through to register for the IBM Conference.
Results
“Look how a software developer proposes!" became the hot viral title both within developer circles and out. It attracted over 2,200,000 viewers in one month. Further exposure on 3rd party websites, attracted a stunning 21,875,000 impressions. In the end:
- Attendance was 43% above target.
- Webcast viewership of Conference was 260,000, 160% above target.
- Revenue through validated leads totaled $9,23M, 54% above target.
- A less quantifiable, but perhaps equally valuable result was how the message of IBM innovation got clearly communicated as well.
Our Thoughts
This is geeks talking to geeks in a particularly geeky way and, guess what? It’s wonderful, because it has huge heart. There have been similar ideas such as AKQA’s Christmas card a year ago when they programmed a hundred microwaves to ping Jingle Bells but what makes this so watchable are the people. A lot of would-be virals never get off the ground because they are too darned clever, too polished, too cold. This has all the joy of JK Get Married (and if you haven’t seen it, go to YouTube now!) and will continue to collect eyeballs long after the conference has been forgotten.